* Posts by streaky

1745 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2010

Bill Gates' nuclear firm plans hot, salty push into power

streaky
Mushroom

Re: No Radiation?

"Molten salt can burn and it can explode"

Well it can't cause a massive hydrogen explosion that's powerful enough to blow the lid off the reactor and piss radiation all the way across an entire continent.

I didn't mean to imply it's safer than cooking boiled potatoes on your induction cooker, but relatively speaking it removes the worst-case scenario. Minimum standard is that water isn't the way.

streaky
Holmes

Re: No Radiation?

Missing the most important point - no water cooling/moderation = no explosion risk.

I've been banging the molten salt reactor drum for at least 10 years now, good to finally see some money going into it at last.

Comrade! If you dare f$%^ing swear on the internet, WE'LL SHOOT

streaky

Sometimes I think they do this on purpose just to make everybody else look sane. David Cameron need some political cover? Oh that's cool we'll ban swearing because obviously there's never going to be a dissenting opinion because everybody is scared of spending their life in a Siberian Gulag for even bringing the subject up - as if we're supposed to consider DC sane by comparison.

Not saying that's the way it is, but it's certainly how it feels. Banning swearing on the net? Guess we can finally get something done about these fucking mouthy Russian Dota 2 kids?

UK gov: Brit biz barons, get your privates in check before the spooks arrive

streaky
WTF?

Re: So let me see

Can't imagine. Another reason not to go public is all I'm seeing here.

The public and business needs protection *from* GCHQ, not by it.

Titsup Apple Developer Centre mystery: Database interloper fingered

streaky

Clearly isn't just the developer accounts that were lifted. Even if they were in this attack, there's a mass password reset request going on with apple IDs, quite a few people I know have been affected.

If apple are denying it somebody should ask why so many people who clearly don't have dev accounts are getting so many reset emails that they have to take to twitter to complain - https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=apple%20id%20reset&src=typd

All started on the 20th.

'First' 3D-printed rifle's barrel splits after single shot

streaky
Alert

Re: Waste of time

@NinjasFTW

That's the problem when you build the capability, courts are going to expect you to use it.

Re the thread more generally: Not for nothing but how do you even define a gun? It's just a tube, they gonna not print all tubes? The system obviously isn't AI so don't build something that implicitly looks like a gun. Software neutered successfully.

ISPs: Relax. Blocking porn online won't really work

streaky
Devil

Re: Just get the filters installed and everyone shut up.

AC #2 or #3 -

"But it's alright because if you can work out how to, you can remove the governor... but 'they' will know that you've done so and therefore every policeman you see will be reaching for his speed gun because you're obviously a lunatic intent on causing destruction and mayhem."

Nono, it's that the average 3 year old knows how to not only remove the governor but also drive at 300mph on country lanes in full view of the cops without them being able to do anything about it.

That's why it's such a massive waste of money. It's not that it'll help stop some kids "accidentally" stumbling upon porn as some clueless reg columnist suggested the other day (i've never accidentally stumbled upon porn accidentally in my life, on or off the internet) - it's that it will be completely 100% transparent to anybody over the age of 5. And it totally skirts round any chance of parliamentary discussion on the issue because instead of legislating he's scared the slimiest of our ISPs into doing it *without* any legislation.

It *is* a total clusterfuck, there can be no doubt. A damn Chinese clusterfuck at that - one that totally removes our ability to take the moral high-ground when talking about freedom in discussions with them too.

Also don't talk about scaremongering when posting as AC - makes you look like an idiot (had to be said - what are we scared of?).

Leap Motion Controller: Hands up for PC air gestures. That's the spirit

streaky

Well...

Mine comes tomorrow like rest of the country.

Lets be honest, you're not seriously going to be using one of these *instead* of a mouse, or a keyboard, you're going to be using it in concert with one.

Say you're a 3d artist. You're going to want to use your left hand to move whatever the object is or the view port and do some gestures and use your mouse to actually do the work so to speak. If it's photoshop you're working with you're gonna want gestures to change tools, handle zoom and stuff like than and save the fine detail for the mouse or pen. Same goes for gaming and whatever else you can think of.

It's early days yet, both users and developers aren't going to know at this point what to do with it, especially with Leap being so blasée‎ about release dates (some of us wanted the thing early so we could be inspired to write some software for it and didn't want the laggy alpha units to play with but apparently Leap wanted time to get software out which I - and many others - informed them via twitter and other media in no uncertain terms was a dumb idea).

The important questions right now are a) is it accurate and b) is it as described - ignoring all the what comes next question. Right now we're at the point we should have been at back in May.

As for the tiredness stuff - some of use who sit at our desks all day could use a little exercise - but I'm thinking elbow on desk?

Five bods wrongly cuffed thanks to bungled comms snooping in UK

streaky
FAIL

Re: Is there no-one writing the legislation for these things

It's called RIPA section 1 and it's pretty explicit.

The issue is the relevant law is not being enforced or overseen as it's supposed to be. The government of the day and the last government seem and seemed to be happy with GCHQ et al telling them what a fantastic job they are doing. Read the report - it's a pretty shocking indictment of the current ICC regime.

streaky
Facepalm

Re: It's the numbers that amaze

It is an extremely concerning figure. It's a pretty massive proportion of the country (more than are ever in their lives likely to be accused much less convicted of any sort of crime - the current prison population for the entire country is less than 100k).

At best it's a disproportionate response to whatever issue we're trying to solve, and it appears we're trying to solve issues that shouldn't be solved with communications data.

PRISM scandal: Brit spooks operated within the law, say politicos

streaky
Facepalm

Re: If whats been done is true...

There are no loopholes. The law is cut and dry. If you are modifying a public communications network (in this case the internet) with the intent of monitoring communications when not warranted against a specific person or business you are, in fact, committing a criminal offence. It's not about when you read the data, the offence is modifying the network to do it. It's written like that for a reason.

The ISC knows this, the police know this, the CPS knows this. What's the issue?

streaky
WTF?

Re: If whats been done is true...

It's pretty clear from the ISC report that they've made no *attempt* to ascertain if GCHQ have been involved in breaches of RIPA Section 1 - which tells me they don't want to know. They've only really covered access to NSA data which nobody is really interested in.

streaky
FAIL

Re: If whats been done is true...

Yeah it's unlikely (given their boasting about how much data they can hoover up) that they've operated within the wording or the spirit of the law.

If the supposed oversight doesn't have f**ks to give then unfortunately this is just going to end up in court and potentially, down the road, some sort of revolution in the way we are governed.

Rackspace won't match Amazon on prices

streaky

Rackspace's issue

.. is that most people don't want fanatical support they just want their stuff working as it should at a reasonable price. Also that SLAs are generally a worthless thing to pay for because providers come up with emergency planned maintenance and other silly workarounds, and that people should be building multi-datacenter/multi-provider applications anyways.

This is why Amazon need large trucks to move their money around.

Ad man: Mozilla 'radicals' and 'extremists' want to wreck internet economy

streaky

How is the only answer to this not "shut up you clown" rather than engagement.. Make it so as Jean-Luc would say.

US Navy coughs $34.5m for hyper-kill railgun that DOESN'T self-destruct

streaky
Mushroom

Re: Revolutionise what?

"I'm not so naive to believe naval warfare (more than deploying aircraft to remote places) is only a thing of the past. But I haven't seen much serious naval warfare lately."

You've seen plenty of naval warfare lately, think bombardment of Libya, the pounding of Baghdad amongst others. Even land-locked Afghanistan was hit from the sea directly back in 2001.

The whole dreadnaught thing is nonsense of course - the more armor you put in front of one of these the bigger the internal shockwave and spalling.

Apple files patent for 'Waze-plus'

streaky

Invention.

Where is it?

Well?

Users can rate things. USPTO would be having some sort of funny joke if they allowed this - even with US patent law such as it is. Whatever they do with the data might be worth a patent but no invention here.

Sky News hack of Canoe Man's email in public interest, Ofcom says

streaky
Holmes

Well even legal (warrant targeted at a specific person, as opposed to world) tapped evidence isn't even admissible in UK courts right now (something successive governments have tried to change.

UK sitting on top of at least 50 years of shale gas – report

streaky
Alert

Re: Can the politicians be trusted...

"why sell it on the World market we could easily reduce UK energy costs by 50% if we limited it to the domestic market"

Then the world market turns round and bans export of, dunno, oil or computers or uranium or something to the UK. Not for nothing but it's going to take a lot of engineering experience we don't have to get this stuff out the ground anyway, which means foreign investment. Be happy with what we found, and remember export sales means more tax revenues.

MPs demand UK rates revamp after Google's 'extraordinary tax mismatch'

streaky
Holmes

Re: So whos going to do business in England?

"2. Pay your taxes according to the law"

This is fairly murky water given evidence suggests Google probably hasn't been paying tax according to the principle or wording of the law. If you make a profit in the UK you're supposed to pay tax on those profits - it's that simple. If you using dodgy accounting practices and lie to parliament and the HMRC over this stuff at best you're sailing close to the edge.

Google says it makes no profit in the UK, which everybody thought was pretty silly and then subsequently a huge pile of fairly believable evidence surfaced suggesting Google were being worse than economical with the truth, in the same way as Apple were being economical with the truth over either their Aussie pricing practices or their US taxation practices.

The argument that Google employs a few people and pays NI and some income tax (though that's probably worth taking a long hard look at anyway) so we should leave them alone is pretty damn silly - because so does every other employer - it's one of the the costs of doing business, and funny story, it's a before-profit cost - and it's not actually that many jobs.

Microsoft borks botnet takedown in Citadel snafu

streaky
Boffin

Re: I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

"somewhere in the EULA they probably have the right to make critical system updates to ensure security"

I've said it before around the 'reg, but I'll say it again: EULAs do not indemnify you against criminal law, and not for nothing but US court's don't have global jurisdiction. The US keeps this stuff up and the Russians will get more backers next ITU conference - something that's bad for all of us generally, but will make this sort of effort impossible. The aim of the game should be look before you leap - if the data is available, check it.

US spyboss: Yes, we ARE snooping on you, but think of the TERRORISTS

streaky
Facepalm

Re: GCHQ

"What I love is that yesterday the morons on the security committee were taking shots at Huwai"

Yeah because there were no 8 year olds available to tell them how stupid they were being in doing this. Now we all look like t**ts. Bet the Chinese think this is all hilarious (government and otherwise).

Seriously I got the Aussies being dumb and protectionist emulating the Yanks, but I thought we were smarter, then the Tory government happened. I literally read this and did the avatar thing.

streaky
Holmes

"been approved by all three branches of the US government"

Been approved by the Judicial branch, has it. In which cases is this?

So, who ought to be the next Doctor Who? It's up to YOU...

streaky
FAIL

Er?

Where's the "Vin Diesel" and "Cancel it, permanently - with nuclear weapons" options?

BBC boffins ponder abstruse Ikea-style way of transmitting telly

streaky
FAIL

"In the early 1990s, every software powerhouse in the industry was touting O-O as the future of software. Many predicted that users would pick and mix components, rather than use monolithic software packages"

And this is what happened, so.. point?

Not for nothing but this was possible (and frankly was done) 20 years ago. Ever seen how many audio languages and subtitle languages and different audio encodings are packed into the average video file? It's that but more, but talking about it like it's an idea worth patenting.

Also seriously conformation bias. It's "Englaned need 360 to level the series" all over again. Somebody at the Beeb needs to buy a spell checker, stat.

Relax, Hollywood, ARM's got your back: New chip 'thwarts' video pirates

streaky
Alien

Re: Maybe force DRM out of the commons

The "commons" can't work like that because the commoners want all the cool stuff that such a system can't provide because publishers won't support because they automatically think they're getting screwed - even if they aren't. Unless you want to spend your life buried in copyleft media obviously that doesn't work.

Not for nothing but it's possible to outlaw *anything* if people in a country want that, there's even a case for damaging and platform restricting DRM in court cases if you've got the money to fight it.

streaky

"the Anon who is ripping the videos is probably going to avoid buying or using hardware with the anti piracy chip in"

Doesn't actually work like this at all.

streaky
Boffin

Unbreakable..

Ignoring the obvious Samuel L Jackson quotes:

Does it stop you reading the panel pixel driving data from that little cable... *points at a ribbon that makes it's way into the back of the digital 1:1 panel that sends an unencrypted signal to drive the pixels*... There!

... think you might have missed a spot. Ooops.

AWS peers into soul of Load Balancers for DNS failover

streaky
Paris Hilton

Re: Use Case

"changing DNS isn't really a viable way of redirecting traffic"

It is if you're smart about it. You have to build extra redundancy in your zones to handle failures, the point is mostly about getting you out of total failure for the portion of your traffic that has already hit that region ASAP. For everything else it's fine.

It's the best solution to the problem put it this way, which is why companies like Google and Microsoft use similar systems to direct traffic. But sure it's a compromise.

streaky
Boffin

Re: Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)

Not trying to be elitist, but if you can't find that out for yourself, AWS isn't designed for you. It's just the way it's set up, there's almost zero support, it's designed with technical people who can look at numbers and find references on Amazon's *extensive* docs in mind.

That being said do a google search for "Amazon Web Services Simple Monthly Calculator" - should get you the answer to the question.

Who did Apple LIE TO: Australia or America?

streaky
Facepalm

Re: Shock Horror!

'Actually, it looks like the usual "Pass the blame" corporate game...'

Actually it /looks/ like a massive fraud is being committed against everybody basically everywhere. Though it's not just Apple.

Not for nothing but if people bothered to pay the taxes they're supposed to pay tax rates could come down or we could live in a better world depending on your political point of view.

Kim Dotcom claims invention of two-factor authentication

streaky
FAIL

This patent...

*isn't* two-factor auth so much as a method of achieving it, but it's not really two-factor auth, because there device *connects* to the thing you're authing with so really it's one-factor. Certainly doesn't describe anything like how google authenticator works if that's what he's claiming. His argument is that the thing you know in the patent is the access to the device itself (phone pin) as opposed to your actual normal login, which is precisely why it *isn't* two factors - the "second factor" is really just the security of the first factor, which does not actually make a second factor at all.

Also not for nothing, but it's clear nobody bothered to proof-read the document because it's full of typos that change the actual meaning of the patent. Why anybody would cite it is beyond me.

"establishing a connection between the data input apparatus and a receiver unit upon verification of the validity of the authorization signal." - if anything this is just plain old fashioned login. Think there's a few patents that predate this.

Brits' phone tracking, web history touted to cops: The TRUTH

streaky
Terminator

Re: Its not very anonymous is it..

"We've heard it before with Phorm"

That's what the IPCC is supposed to be for. With Phorm the person concerned didn't push it far enough, got some wishy-washy response about data protection act. Completely missed the boat.

I wasn't a victim of that crime so I wasn't in a position to do anything about it.

streaky
Facepalm

Re: This is all entirely legal ?

The only traffic data relevent to the communication system is IP addresses, and there's no requirement to *store* it for the purposes of transmitting it. A postal worker can read the name/address off the front of a letter. They don't open the letter to see where it needs to go then record that information for all customers and try to flog it to the Met.

You do see the difference right? A system needs to see telephone numbers to route calls, it doesn't need to know who you're specifically calling at the other end, and what about.

Not for nothing but this stuff is all copy/pasted from the telecommunications act, the same intent applies. Criminal complaint update: looking for more proof this happened and a police force that isn't the Met near London.

streaky
Coffee/keyboard

Re: This is all entirely legal ?

Sorry I replied to somebody else pointing out that under RIPA a criminal offence has apparently been committed. There's no contract terms that get them out of this. You can't write contract terms that absolve you things like this - RIPA exceptions are on a per-communication basis, they don't work with whole-scale data mining of communications over a public network. It's illegal, nothing more to it.

Put it this way, the police need a warrant, and so do MI5, think of a reason some random company wouldn't given that the government could just farm this crap out to ISPs.

Put it another way. If they recorded all your phone calls, and had some small print that said "we may record all your phone calls" - do you think it would be legal? RIPA treats phone calls the same as internet traffic, emails, snail mail etc.

streaky
Black Helicopters

Re: Its not very anonymous is it..

Don't bother with civil court. By "legal" people mean under the DP act, but under section 1 of RIPA they have committed a criminal offence punishable by time in prison. As an EE customer, I'm a victim of this crime and will make this known to the police when I've collected enough evidence.

Ubuntu without the 'U': Booting the Big Four remixes

streaky

Re: And if 8 isn't enough...

Or even better still, LMDE.

Court orders Visa partner to allow donations to WikiLeaks

streaky
FAIL

Re: Good!

Any company should be able to not do business with whoever they feel like not doing business.

I'm just wondering how much business Visa actually do in Iceland and if they've considered withdrawing all services. i.e. who needs who more.

Why hacking and platforms are the future of NHS IT

streaky
Alert

"does anyone still believe in large top-down centrally architected IT solutions?"

Well-built ones, sure? The problem seems to be related to the fact the NHS has no clue about IT and they'll pay any invoice levelled at them. In principle a national system for the NHS is a Good Thing (TM). Actually there's an argument that this is a government cluelessness problem, but one that's easily fixed.

Texas judge sends Uniloc packing in Rackspace patent suit

streaky
Paris Hilton

Re: Patent 01

The Apple rectangle patent is real though =) USD670286S1 makes me rofl every time I see it, which happens often to remind myself never to buy an Apple device.

Indonesia: e-commerce firms must have local domain

streaky
FAIL

Re: We need this in the UK

How do you define "specifically target" on the internet? Not for nothing but anything that even smells like what the article discusses is bad bad everybody everywhere in the first world - certainly isn't something to be emulated.

Furious Stephen Fry blasts 'evil' Reg and 'TW*T' Orlowski

streaky
Boffin

Re: The lady doth protest too much.

"if he stopped to think about it would be ridiculously hard to implement"

It's not that it would be hard to implement so much as it'd eat power for fun and profit. GPS being totally passive (unless you're dealing with the crypted signals) doesn't use much power, so you can put it in say, a mobile phone..

Apple's marketing honcho Schiller attacks Android, Samsung

streaky
Big Brother

Point?

"Over 50 percent are still on software that is two years old"

And what, the old versions don't totally fail like old version of iOS - hell, they have multitasking n' everything. Because people aren't stupid enough to think they need a new phone every year (which apple customers will soon tire of) that doesn't make Apple super awesome.

Microsoft unveils even more tempting Kinect offering: Open source

streaky
Alien

Re: Trying to catch up with the Leap

"This to me looks like an attempt to at least partially head off the Leap Motion"

Doubful. They do completely different things, there isn't even a drop of overlap.

streaky
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Plenty of hardware available.

"Doesn't seem like a microsoft move to do something that won't make them money or help with consumer/developer lock-in"

Please. People always say that. Yet Microsoft are involved in stacks of open source projects both in benevolence and making it work better on windows fashion (the latter isn't evil, it's just what any sane company would do, but Apple don't - I know people who work on Open Source projects that Apple have said "sure" and then said it'll cost $XX,XXX for their time).

Modder hacks SimCity for unlimited offline play

streaky
Facepalm

Re: It's also a bit shit ...

Yeah I noticed they make really horrific routing decisions. Hopefully they'll patch it. Avoid busy roads - not massively complex. Maybe it's an american thing? :)

How UK gov's 'growth' measures are ALREADY killing the web

streaky
Megaphone

Re: Will it really?

Nah, because it's an issue that can and will go to court - the other party would have to prove that they took reasonable steps and the burden of proof is on them. There's nothing implied or explicit regarding dumping of rights just because it's on the internet. If you produce content and you can't afford to fight in court then you're already stuffed, the new laws will change nothing on that front for good or bad.

Actually if anything it might be a good opportunity to bring some sort of arbitration into UK copyright law. Now I think about it, I need to email my MP sharpish..

1 in 7 WinXP-using biz bods DON'T KNOW Microsoft is pulling the plug

streaky
Boffin

Nope. The SSL stack in windows XP is outdated and broken. There's no fixes coming, Microsoft have said so. End of.

XP is an outdated OS and the day that it goes EOL people will start sorting out their support for it on servers, i.e. that is - removing it.

Anything <= WinXP is affected by it.

streaky
FAIL

Votedowns for truth, or why the reg is becoming like youtube.

Seriously, you vote down but neglect to provide a counter-argument? Grow up.

UK Serious Fraud Office queues up to probe HP's Autonomy allegations

streaky
Terminator

Re: Not taking sides but if, IF

Also not for nothing but HP's due diligence should have spotted everything they're alleging anyway. Can't figure out what it is HP are trying to achieve with the allegations they're making.

Stave off the inevitable board firings for a little while longer?